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Wolf Baby
Location: Louisville, Kentucky Date: November 4, 1990 Story On November 4th, 1990 on the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, 31-year-old Jackie Wilson was pregnant with her third child. Her husband, Dusty, was watching TV at 12:30am after she went to bed. Dusty wasn't feeling like going to sleep yet and was flipping through channels. Suddenly, Jackie came out of bed, complaining that she wasn't feeling well. Being nine months pregnant, they planned to give birth the next day. After they sat on the couch, Jackie felt faint and say her heart was beating really fast. Dusty felt it pounding really hard. Around 12:35am, Dusty called their obstetrician, Dr. Katherine Cashner, and told her about Jackie's problems. She advised Dusty to take Jackie to the hospital and check her out. Approximately at 12:55am, Dusty had their pastor's wife keep an eye on their two sons at home while he took Jackie to the hospital 11 miles away. "I had no idea if anything serious was going to happen. I just knew that Jackie was feeling exhausted, she was feeling stressed," Dusty stated. On the way to the hospital, Jackie said she was feeling cold and Dusty turned the heater on. A few seconds later, she started to get hot and he turned it off. He was starting to get scared and the only thing on his mind was getting to the hospital. Then he heard Jackie gasping for air and she started to have a seizure. She then slumped over to his seat and stopped breathing. He checked her pulse and didn't find any of it. He drove faster and ignored the traffic lights while yelling out her name. "I knew that she was dead in the car," Dusty stated. "I just started howling her name and telling her not to leave me and the boys. That we couldn't make it without her." At Humana Otteman Hospital shortly after 1am, Dr. Eddie Hooker, who finished his shift in the emergency room and was about to go home, was speaking to the paramedics in the ambulance bay when Dusty's car quickly arrived with its hazard lights on and its horn honking. Dr. Hooker rushed over and found Jackie in cardiac arrest. He carried her in and yelled out that they got a critical patient. Dr. Hooker and the nurses put her on a gurney and rushed her to a trauma room. "You only have four minutes to save a life and we don't know how long she'd been in cardiac arrest, so I wasn't even sure if we can save her. But I knew if we didn't act quickly, she was dead and so was this baby," Dr. Hooker recalled. Once they got Jackie on the monitor, they found that she was in ventricular fibrillation and her heart wasn't pumping any blood. They started CPR and Dr. Hooker used a defibrillator to shock her heart to beating. Emergency nurse Edie Harper also treated Jackie and knew that her odds are not good. "In my 10 years of nursing, I never dealt with an experience quite like this one was that we had two lives at stake instead of just one. And not knowing at that point whether the baby was alive or was dead or whether we can bring Jackie back to life," Harper recalled. As Dr. Hooker and the nurses work frantically to save Jackie, Dusty waited anxiously in the waiting room. "There was a very lonely feeling in the waiting room. Nobody had said anything, but I knew I lost my wife. I just...knew inside that I wasn't going to see her alive again," Dusty recalled. While working on Jackie, they found a slow pulse and tried to speed her heart up. Then they lost the pulse and her heart stopped again. Dr. Hooker began to lose hope and thought they would have to do an emergency C-section which they don't like to do in the emergency room, but occasionally would if the mother couldn't be saved. The second time, Jackie's heart went into a fast rhythm about 220 times a minute. She became combative and was given a muscle relaxant to calm her down. She started to relax, but then her heart stopped again. They shocked her for the third time and she went back to a more normal good rhythm and blood pressure. An OB nurse came and checked to see if the baby was alive. At 1:15am, they located its heartbeat, much to their relief. Soon after, Dr. Cashner arrived and Dr. Hooker gave her a capsule summary of what was going on. They agreed that Jackie was stable and decided the best thing to do was to deliver the baby. Dr. Hooker and Dr. Cashner went to talk to Dusty and explained to him that Jackie was doing okay and things had been real bad. He asked to see her and was told yes, but she couldn't talk because of the tube in her throat. "They said in order to continue to help my wife, they had to take the baby. That was another pressure point right now because we both wanted the baby, but it was hard to feel like in the back of your mind that you may the lost of the little one to gain the life of your wife," Dusty recalled. Dusty went to see Jackie and she squeezed his hand. He told her he loved her and she squeezed his hand again. Then he had to leave as she was about to go to the operating room. Dr. Hooker was going over all the lab work to find out why Jackie went into cardiac arrest and discovered in the heart tracing that she has Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome. WPW is a rare heart disorder in which the heart has a extra electrical wire and when it short-circuits, the electricity doesn't work right and the heart stops beating. Jackie underwent the C-section and gave birth to a healthy baby girl who she named Morgan. A week after, doctors performed open-heart surgery on Jackie to correct her rare heart disorder. "The staff in Otteman Hospital...words they can't describe how we feel about them. They cried with us, they hurt when we hurt, and there were more than just a doctor/professional relationship I felt," Jackie admitted. "I don't think as long as I do emergency medicine, I don't have a case that will reward me as much and I don't think people who aren't doctors will ever have anything in their life that will reward as much as this case rewarded me," Dr. Hooker said. Months later, the Wilson family's life is back to normal. "We had two boys, but that girl has been missing. So now we got a baby girl and our family is complete," Dusty stated. "My life has changed a lot through this and you don't take life for granted. Each day, I try to live it to the fullest. We've been given each other. We've been given a second chance and that's something money can't buy," Jackie stated. Category:1990 Category:Kentucky Category:Cardiac Arrest Category:Childbirth